From Gardener to $23K in Two Months

Introduction

Sam Zadworny is an ex-gardener who turned into a web programmer and an affiliate marketer.

He has launched several digital products which have earned him quite a bit of money.

In this interview Sam tells me his whole story, favorite traffic sources, and how to earn money by launching your own digital products.

Mr. Web Capitalist Interviews Sam Zadworny aka Mr.Z.

Could you describe what do you do and how you earn your living?

I’m a web programmer / PHP developer and that’s my daily job, but it’s more ‘internet lifestyle’ than 9-5 job, so I do it from whatever location and pretty much whenever I want 😉

I work on one main project which is navigation software for commercial ships.

Internet marketing is my hobby and I do it on and off, previously as a product vendor and currently, I’m trying to succeed with mobile CPA offers.

How did you get started?

It’s a long story how I started my journey as a web designer first, then PHP developer and then affiliate marketer.

Long story short:

I worked as a gardener in London, UK, living costs were high and I was earning shitty money.

I was spending over 2 hours per day in public transport and I wanted to change something in my life. So I ordered 2 big books, about 500 pages each from Amazon about web designing and when traveling to work and back, I was learning.

Later I’ve done my very first website for a guy from Puerto Rico for £30 and it took me over a week to complete.

Some time after that I discovered affiliate marketing for the first time when I found ClickBank.com.

I was excited back then and was buying product after product to find out how to earn money from affiliate marketing. It was shiny object syndrome: I thought one product is better than the previous one and I ended up with well over $1000 spent and earned $0.

I tried pretty much everything and nothing worked, so I started thinking that affiliate marketing simply doesn’t work and only product vendors can earn good money in internet marketing.

So I started working on my own project later named “The Generation Plugin”. It was a set of tools to help bloggers make money from their blogs by building a mailing list and sending offers related to the blog content to their subscribers.

It took me a good few months to create my first product as I had 9-5 job + travel time, so I had very limited time when I could work on the project: evenings and weekends only.

Finally, I finished the product and it started selling slow but ended with over 700 sales and almost $23K in profit after the first 2 months.

It became “Product of the day” on JVZoo.com and “Top 10 products of the week” on WSOScout.com, and on that day I made close to $4000!

And that’s without any pre-release buzz, affiliates or JV list or promoting the product everywhere. The only thing I’ve done back then was ‘Bump’ a forum post daily on WarriorForum for $20.

It was just a good product.

Later few ‘small’ affiliates jumped in and helped me sell about 150 more copies.

A year later I released another product that was basically the first product converted into PLR version, which became “Deal of the day” on “WarriorPlus” and sold in 300 copies for a bit higher price: $67-$97 per copy. Then I finally sold the whole thing to Gavin from Canada on Flippa.com.

My third product was “IM toolbox” (IM stands for Internet Marketing) based on monthly subscriptions. I created it, but never properly released it as I’ve made a huge mistake: I didn’t do proper research and I developed few serious Facebook tools just before Facebook deprecated one of their mighty APIs and those tools became useless right after that.

Meanwhile, I had some episode with domains and I sold a number of premium .co domains and still have some of them in my portfolio: parcels.co, generation.co, barristers.co, interiors.co, mowers.co, alcantara.co, extras.co, euphoria.co, stylists.co, maybach.co, clickbank.tv and more;

This year I plan to release a product about the tech side of mobile CPA, where I want to show how to make a landing page that loads in a split of a second, which is super important in mobile traffic, and lots more tech bits and pieces that even some super affiliates don’t know about.

I’m a technical guy and I’m obsessed with landing pages performance lately, so I’m gonna use this skill to build my next product 🙂

What’s your typical workday like?

I don’t have any specific everyday routine. I never set the alarm clock, but my usual wake up time is about 8 AM. Usual morning stuff and then I normally go with my fiancee to her beauty salon (she’s an owner) and she’s doing her job and I’m doing mine. After work, we go to the cinema or gym.

Weekends are more interesting. So generally I don’t do 16-hour days like years ago, but do my thing and trying to enjoy my life.

What makes You the most money?

Currently my job: developing a navigation software but I’ve earned the most money as a product vendor.

My record is $23000 in 8 weeks and close to $4000 in one day.

What is your Top source of traffic?

As a product vendor, I used Warrior Forum as my top traffic source.

Currently, I do mobile CPA and my main traffic source is Zeropark.com and other popup and popunder networks, plus domain redirects on a smaller scale and I want to try push notifications next. While many affiliates are moving to Facebook, I believe you can still make good money with pop traffic. I’m just starting with this, but already have some small successes like a landing page with minimum 10% CTR or campaign with 2000% – it earns only about $20 per day on average, but the cost is almost zero. This is just a beginning, now it’s time to scale and see what happens…

I also like to listen Robert Gryn (the founder of Voluum and Zeropark) on his YouTube channel as he showed that the sky is the limit in internet marketing: he was on Forbes magazine cover and he’s building a Billion dollar company now.

Are there any must-have tools or resources you recommend for internet marketers?

The most important from all is a good course or even better: good mentor, the rest is secondary. I found mine: Taiwo Balogun aka cashmoneyaffiliate.

I do mobile popups at the moment so I can list must-have tools for that.

Actually, everything’s described in my AffiliateFix.com thread. This thread was started last year and I’ve been doing it on and off.

At the beginning not much happened, but since I’ve built a winning landing page and found converting offer, things became more interesting.

What does the Internet Lifestyle mean to you?

Freedom!

You can work from whatever place you wish and pretty much whenever you want and this is priceless.

If I want to take tomorrow off or whole next week, I just do it. I don’t use this privilege very often as I’m trying to be hard working, but it happens 🙂

What advice would you give to people just starting out with an online business?

First: Choose something that works for others, something that brings big profit to other affiliates and stick to it until you make money. If others make money with it, you can too, period.

Things don’t work on your finger snap, you have to work for success and consistency is the key.

Second: Find a good mentor – a guy who is an authority in his specialty. Just remember to do some research about the guy or the course he’s offering to avoid being tricked by a scam artist and waste your hard earned money. I’ve been there!

Third: Take action! Dedicate some time to learn first: a week, a month, whatever time you need to learn some foundations and then do actual work.

If you promote CPA offers: learn how to do that and promote as many offers as you can. You can learn much more by doing stuff than just learning.